The wide and wonderful world of a British general election

By Samuel Pennifold, MINT 2nd year

Embattled Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Rishi Sunak, after months of speculation, has called for a general election. In so doing, dissolving the British parliament and triggering a wacky six-week period of pure politics that will culminate on July 4, polling day.

The British Parliamentary System is one of the oldest continuous systems of democracy but is largely archaic and confusing. To break it down simply, the UK is divided into 650 electorate constituencies, which each sends one Member of Parliament (MP) to Westminster based on geography, community ties, and population by the four boundary commissions for England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. These constituencies remain largely the same year after year. Still, changes have been introduced across the country, meaning there are 543 English constituencies, 57 Scottish constituencies, 32 Welsh constituencies, and 18 Northern Irish constituencies. 

Each seat is contested by various political parties and independent candidates, but only the right-wing Conservative and Unionist Party led by Rishi Sunak – commonly known as the Conservative or Tory Party -, the left-wing Labour Party led by Keir Starmer, and the centrist Liberal Democrat Party led by Ed Davey, are pretty much guaranteed to compete in almost every seat. The winner in each constituency is based on a first-past-the-post system, meaning that the winner is decided by who has the largest vote share and does not necessarily require them to have a majority. This system tends to favour the major parties and punish the smaller ones. It also results in tactical voting, meaning that in competitive seats, some voters will not vote for their preferred party nationally but vote for another party to ensure that another party does not win. This is particularly true for Labour and Liberal Democrat voters, who will vote traditionally to oust Conservative MPs.

Regional parties such as Plaid Cymru, a left-wing Welsh nationalist party; the Scottish Nationalist Party; Sinn Féin, an Irish republican party; and the Democratic Unionist Party, a loyalist unionist British nationalist party in Northern Ireland, will be the only ones competing for seats. Though Sinn Féin maintains an abstentionist policy, meaning, in opposition to what they view as British colonisation of Ireland, they refuse to take their seats in the British Parliament, lowering the required majority each year in Parliament to form a government.

After the election, the leader of the largest party will go to the King, this being his first general election following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and ask to form a government. This is now a largely ceremonial requirement. Since the Second World War, this has generally been an easy task, as electoral politics have been dominated by the Conservative and Labour parties, who have handed leadership back and forth, winning various-sized majorities at general elections. Though coalition governments can also be formed if no party has a majority, this is called a hung parliament. In this scenario, parties can form a coalition and jointly ask to form a government. This is what happened in 2010 when the Conservatives, supported by the Liberal Democrats—something which many young voters have never forgiven them for—replaced the Gordon Brown-led Labour Party following three winning general elections under Tony Blair in 1997, 2001, and 2005.

The 2010 general election was the start of 14 years of unbroken Tory government, though with an exceptionally increasing number of Prime Ministers from 2016, including David Cameron – who has recently returned to government as The Right Honourable Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton to serve as Foreign Secretary as a Lord, not an MP -, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss (who lasted just 45 days as Prime Minister after crashing the economy), and now Rishi Sunak. The last 14 years have seen mass austerity drive public services into the ground—a political ideology that is best understood as the belief that the global financial crash of 2008 was caused by there being too many libraries in Wolverhampton, as put by Alexei Sayle—and the car crash that was Brexit. Voters have become increasingly fatigued with the Conservatives, and on July 4th, they are likely to oust them.

The Labour Party, which holds an over 20% lead in the poll and, for many, are the already predetermined winners of the election, will be hoping to take back the so-called “red wall” of the northern-working-class who voted overwhelmingly for Brexit and the Conservatives in the last general election in 2019. Even if they do not, they are likely to gain a 100-seat majority, though this could easily be much higher. The Conservatives will be hoping to avoid an electoral demolition comparable to the Canadian 1993 federal election, which saw the Reform Party gradually replace the Canadian Tories as the major right-wing party in Canada. The British Conservative Party faces a similar challenge from the Reform U.K. party, which sits slightly to the right of Attila the Hun, is a rebranded UKIP party whose rising popularity in the early 2010s led former Prime Minister and current Foreign Secretary David Cameron to call for the original Brexit referendum. Their policies include “stopping the boats,” “stopping the boats,” and “stopping the boats.”

The Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third-largest party, who haven’t held power since the 1920s but did participate in a coalition government in 2010 with the Conservative Party, will be hoping for a strong showing. In many moderately high-earning suburban areas of the South East of England, they are likely to replace the Conservatives. The Green Party will be hoping to build on their recent moment in recent local elections and add to their current singular MP. They could pose, in some areas, a significant challenge to the Labour Party, but not enough to worry Kier Starmer. A not-so-fun fact is that Zack Polanski, the deputy leader of the Green Party, used to do hypnotherapy on women to increase their breast size.

The Scottish National Party, who have been mired by scandal and crime in recent times, will be aiming to maintain their majority within Scotland (elections in Scotland are routinely viewed by the SNP and the political class as a running of the Scottish independence referendum). Though similar to 1997, when Tony Blair won his first of three general elections, the Labour Party leads Scottish opinion polls. The other separatist-nationalist parties, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Féin, will be hoping to gain seats as part of the broader separatist goals, though the local and devolved elections are more significant to them. 

The campaigning period right up until July 4 is likely to range from the intense to the bizarre, but we will almost certainly see an end to this current era of Conservative rule, which, for many in the UK, is a welcome thought.